More than 10,000 women in tech gather in Houston

Elizabeth Weise

USA TODAY

A flurry of coding, kudos and hiring is expected this week in Houston as a record 12,000 people attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.

Dubbed the largest gathering of women technologists in the world, the conference is trending as tech companies in Silicon Valley have begun to release numbers on women, African-Americans and Hispanics in their workforces.

Hopper, as it's called, grew 25% just from last year when 8,000 women and supporters attended.

That, famously, was the conference where Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella got into hot water for saying during a plenary session that women shouldn't ask for raises because their work would be noticed on its own.

This year Nadella will be attending the conference but not speaking, Microsoft said.

The conference has become a go-to event for women in tech, many of whom work in largely male environments, a place to find inspiration and rejuvenation.

Even former Google executive Megan Smith, now the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, said she was so happy to be back surrounded by "my people."

Hopper has also become a major hunting ground for companies looking to hire women engineers and coders.

"A lot of companies have started to realize that this is an issue they need to engage with. And a lot of them come here just to recruit, let's be honest," said Elizabeth Ames with the Anita Borg Institute, which co-sponsors the conference.​

Hiring and paying women was a topic Wednesday when the CEO of Internet registrar GoDaddy, a company with a history of notoriously sexist ads, revealed how much money men and women make there.

At GoDaddy, women are paid roughly 1 cent more than men. Technical women were paid 99 cents on the dollar, said CEO Blake Irving.

That's well above the U.S. average. In general, women make 79 cents for every dollar men make, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

GoDaddy's numbers were better than they’d hoped, but weren’t so good for management and the higher ranks of programmers, Irving said.

It was a rare look into women’s pay rates. Over the past two years multiple large tech companies in Silicon Valley have begun to release diversity information about their staffs. However almost none have released data about pay disparities.

The Go Daddy salary information only includes women and Irving said he didn’t yet have information to make available about the company’s racial breakdown.

Irving said he hopes that by taking the step to talk about salaries it will “promote more transparency in the industry as a whole.”

The conference is named for Grace Hopper, an early computer scientist and rear admiral with the U.S. Navy.

Wednesday's plenary ended with Smith thanking the men who attended Hopper this year.

She said she'd recently spoken with actress Meryl Streep, who talked about “the new chivalry – which could be a new hash tag — it’s when men do awesome things” to support women.

Having male allies for women in tech is crucial, Smith said. The 21st century “is all about together.”